OSI Wins New Smart Grid Project to Supply Advanced Volt/VAR Control System to Modesto Irrigation District

January 17, 2011, Minneapolis, Minnesota -- Open Systems International, Inc. (OSI) has been awarded a new contract by Modesto Irrigation District (MID) of Modesto, California, for a new multi-phased real-time Volt/VAR Control System project.

Located in California's Central Valley, MID (www.mid.org) is a multi-service utility that provides electric service to more than 111,000 residential, commercial and industrial accounts; serves irrigation water to over 58,000 acres of California farmland; and supplies a daily average of about 36 million gallons of treated drinking water to the City of Modesto. MID is publicly owned, controlled by a locally elected Board of Directors and not-for-profit.

Based on the OSI Spectra™ Distribution Management System (DMS) platform, this multi-phased new Volt/VAR Control (VVC) System project will enable MID to optimize system voltage levels, reduce system losses, manage reactive power supply and implement conservation voltage reduction. The project will ultimately span 34 distribution substations and 170 distribution feeders. In a later phase, the contract may be expanded to include full Smart Grid DMS functionality.

The new Volt/VAR Control system for MID is based on OSI's monarch™ (Multi-platform Open Network ARCHitecture) platform, along with the advanced functionality presented by OSI's next-generation, .NET-based Graphical User Interface; Distribution Network Management; Geographic Information Systems Interface; Distribution Power Flow and Conservation Voltage Reduction, with an interface to Silver Spring Network's AMI system.OSI (www.osii.com) provides open, state-of-the-art and high-performance automation solutions to utilities worldwide.